Students should be taught how textures work, where different memories reside, and that GPUs operate differently than a CPU. At this point I think everyone knows where I stand, so I'll just let it go, since my comments are not being taken seriously.
Leif, I don't think it's true that your comments aren't being taken seriously.
I agree with you that pygame has suffered from a shortage of maintainer time. But I take issue on a couple of other points:
1. I don't think it's realistic to teach all students about memory hierarchies and the differences between GPUs and CPUs, while they're also trying to learn lots of other concepts about how to build a game, and possibly even learning to program. Those are topics people will need to know about if they want to build games more seriously, but a lot of people using pygame are not doing it to build big complex games.
2. As Ian explained, the kinds of games many people build with pygame cannot easily be 'hardware accelerated', because they don't fit GPU work patterns. But there are still a lot of fun and interesting things we can do in CPU-based games! Pygame survives in a niche of people building simple games which don't need great performance. If we can expand that niche, great, but your plan sounds like jumping out of the niche and trying to compete with other higher-performance frameworks, which doesn't sound like a good idea to me.